Gershon Kekst, leader in Wall Street public relations, dies

Michael J. de la Merced

Published 10:21 pm, Friday, March 24, 2017

Gershon Kekst, a corporate adviser who counseled many of the biggest deal makers during the merger boom of the 1980s and helped form the modern financial public relations industry, died March 17 in New York. He was 82.

A representative of the firm he founded, Kekst & Co., confirmed Mr. Kekst’s death at a hospital. No other details were given.

For more than five decades in public relations, Mr. Kekst forged relationships with business moguls such as Sanford I. Weill of Citigroup and Henry R. Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, as well as the bankers and lawyers who advised them on takeovers and other financial matters.

“I don’t think it really existed before” Mr. Kekst, said Martin Lipton, a prominent mergers lawyer who often worked alongside him. “It had always been around in some way, but he professionalized it.”

Although the public’s image of a public relations maven may tend toward that of a garrulous sales representatives willing to talk one’s ear off, Mr. Kekst was known as a counselor of few words, even during crucial board meetings. He said that what he offered was saykhl — the Yiddish word for common sense and judgment.

“The thing that most impressed not just me but everybody is that Gershon brought calmness and sense to a meeting,” Lipton said in an interview. “He was one of those people who, when he spoke — which was not that often — people paid attention.”

Mr. Kekst sat with McGraw-Hill in the late 1970s as it sought to fend off a takeover by American Express, advised Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in the late 1980s in its successful bid to buy RJR Nabisco in the frenzied merger contest made famous by the book “Barbarians at the Gate,” and counseled Chrysler as it rebuffed unwanted bids by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian in the 1990s.

And it was Mr. Kekst who oversaw the public relations side of Citicorp’s merger with Travelers in the late ’90s, giving birth to the financial colossus Citigroup. Mr. Kekst had been a longtime public relations adviser to the deal’s maestro, Weill.

“He was wise, always spoke the truth, even as unpleasant as that can sometimes be, and over time became a trusted adviser whose opinion was sought after by CEOs, lawyers and bankers alike,” Maurice Lévy, chairman of Publicis, the advertising giant that owns Kekst & Co., wrote in a memorandum to employees.

Gershon Kekst was born on Oct. 12, 1934, in Salem, Mass., to Hannah, an immigrant from Palestinian territory, and Joseph Jacob, an immigrant from Lithuania. Both his parents taught in Hebrew school; his father died when he was 4. By the time he attended the University of Maryland, he had his ambitions set on becoming a radio journalist; he told the New York Times in 1989, “I didn’t just want to be a radio broadcaster; I wanted to be Edward R. Murrow.”

But upon graduating, Mr. Kekst switched his career path to public relations, first in Washington and then in New York at Ruder & Finn. By the time he struck out on his own, in 1971, he had begun to focus on the nascent field of financial communications.

In the 1989 interview with the Times, he suggested that the focus had evolved as much out of necessity as anything else.

“The first deals that came to us were financial,” he said. “If the first deals had been with the fashion industry, I think it’s fair to say that we’d be a fashion PR firm.”

But Mr. Kekst quickly aligned himself with many of the deal makers who would soon loom large over the industry, including his eventual mentor, Joseph H. Flom of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Lipton, of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

Mr. Kekst struck a deal of his own in 2008, agreeing to sell the firm that bore his name to Publicis. He said at the time that he had been negotiating with the firm “for almost 10 years” before securing a sale price that people briefed on the terms said was as high as $150 million.

He stayed on until 2009. The firm now employs 70 people out of its office on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan.